As computer display systems increase in complexity the need to keep the interface simple and user friendly becomes more essential. A great advancement in this area has been the creation of a cursor control, so that a cursor may be moved freely around a display screen and point to individual segments of displayed contents. A user of a computer can move the cursor to a segment of interest on the display and effect certain computer instructions to act on that segment specifically. A common example of the use of the cursor is to enable the user to point to a specific item in a list or a specific icon, which represents a file, folder, program or other computer data. Then the user can effect a sequence of computer instructions through some input means, such as a xe2x80x9cmouse click,xe2x80x9d that causes the file, folder, program or other computer component to be xe2x80x9copenedxe2x80x9d and/or activated.
Other advancements have been made that can give a user a greater ability to move some or all of the contents of a display screen around the display. This capability is especially useful when the format of the information contents is larger (longer, wider or both) than the display can show at one time. At first this capability was limited to either scrolling vertically or horizontally, but newer programs have been developed to allow the free movement of the contents in any direction. Examples of this type of display screen can be found, for example, in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/328,053, filed Jun. 8th, 1999, which is incorporated herein by reference. In this application, a hand held device displays a portion of a computer image, and a user scrolls this image by moving the hand held device in real space. However, navigating a cursor at the same time as scrolling in real space can become burdensome to the user.
As greater advancements in the movement of display screen contents are made, the burden on the user to manage the controls also increases. What is needed is a novel simplification of the way display screen contents are navigated.
The present invention seeks to improve the user interface with a display screen for computer systems that have maneuverable contents such as pan and scroll functions and/or unconstrained movement of the contents. One objective of the invention is to simplify the number of controls that a user must manipulate to find specific items of interest within information contents on display, and then to select the specific items with a cursor to effect further computer action.
In a preferred embodiment, the fixed cursor has a toggle function, which stops the cursor from being fixed. In yet another preferred embodiment, the fixed cursor is used in conjunction with a hand-held display device. In a combination of preferred embodiments, movement controls that scroll the contents of the hand-held display switch to moving the cursor when the toggle function is activated. Most preferably, motion commands move the contents of the display in the hand held display device, allowing the hand-held display to be operated with only one hand.
In another preferred embodiment, contents of a display will not scroll past the axes of the cursor, thereby keeping some portion of the content visible on the display at all times. Preferably the axes of the cursor are not show on the display.